Negotiating the Bi-Vocal Discourses of "Catholic" and, "Protestant ", "Nationalist " and, "Loyalist " : Irish Traveller Identity as "Third Space"

Abstract

Decades of Irish literary criticism set up an exaggerated and bi-vocal opposition of "Catholic" and "Protestant", whilst ignoring the post-partition conflict of landed and landless. The Irish Traveller voice constitutes an imaginative and shared resistance to dominant discourses, and is a "third tradition" that cannot be easily or consistently identified with either "side". The minority's oral tradition subverts and transforms narratives emanating from the majority cultures on the island of Ireland, and literature by and about Travellers disregard the sacred cows of dominant identities, often revealing an alternative version of the past to that sanctioned by official memory. In refuting the fixed identities offered by Northern Irish society, and in embracing fluidity and ambiguity, Bryan MacMahon's novel, The Honey Spike (1967), and Belfast Traveller Nan Joyce's memoir, My Life on the Road (2000), circuitously appropriate the potentially exclusionary discourse of the Traveller as internal exile.